A One-Night-Only East Coast Premiere of Tobias Picker’s “Awakenings”
We are excited to announce that Odyssey Opera, in partnership with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), will present the East Coast premiere of Tobias Picker and Aryeh Lev Stollman’s Awakenings on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 7.30pm.
Baritone Jarrett Porter plays the lead role of Dr. Oliver Sacks, alongside a cast including sopranos Joyce El-Khoury and Adrienne Danrich, accompanied by the Odyssey Opera Chorus and BMOP. Tickets for this one-night only, fully-staged operatic production at the Huntington Avenue Theatre are available now.
“a sensitive adaptation [whose] elegaic, autumnal score treads delicately in these stories of unrealized possibility.”
– Wall Street Journal
Tobias Picker, the Grammy Award winning composer, became friends with Oliver Sacks after Picker approached the doctor for help with his Tourette syndrome. Sacks attended many of Picker’s earlier operas at the Metropolitan Opera, in Santa Fe and at Glimmerglass, and they discussed what would become this full-length retelling of the Awakenings story many times over the years.
Probing into the themes originally explored by Sacks’s groundbreaking book— statuesque immobilization, locked-in secrets, and the poetic possibility of renewed life, this sensitive operatic adaptation is the first to accurately portray Oliver Sacks as a shy gay man struggling with his sexuality — something he only revealed publicly decades later in his 2015 memoir.
Oliver Sacks and Tobias Picker. Photo by Anna Schori
Baritone Jarrett Porter, interviewed for St Louis Public Radio ahead of the world premiere of Awakenings at the Opera Theater of St. Louis last year, said, “There’s a chance to go back and tell that story again, with the perspective of where he got to later in his life. In my generation, I felt late coming out as a gay man — I’d just turned 29. That’s very different to Oliver, who came out when he was in his 80s.”
Dr. Oliver Sacks, as played by Jarrett Porter in “Awakenings” at the Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2022. Photo © OTSL/Eric Woolsey
Baritone Jarrett Porter, interviewed for St Louis Public Radio ahead of the world premiere of Awakenings at the Opera Theater of St. Louis last year, said, “There’s a chance to go back and tell that story again, with the perspective of where he got to later in his life. In my generation, I felt late coming out as a gay man — I’d just turned 29. That’s very different to Oliver, who came out when he was in his 80s.”
📷 Dr. Oliver Sacks, as played by Jarrett Porter in “Awakenings” at the Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2022. Photo © OTSL/Eric Woolsey
An excerpt from the opera
Awakenings: “I Do Not Need Much Sleep”
Susanna Phillips, soprano (as Rose)
Ursula Oppens, piano
Filmed & edited by H. Paul Moon | @zenviolence
Audio engineered by Iver Atkins at Skillman Studios, Brooklyn, NY on September 16, 2022
Celebrate the opera by watching a live screening of the newly digitized 1990 film Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, and a supporting cast including Julie Kavner, John Heard, Ruth Nelson, Anne Meara, Max von Sydow, and Judith Malina. (See if you can also spot jazz legend Dexter Gordon, a young Bradley Whitford and even Vin Diesel!). This film, nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Picture, remains a tour de force.
Oliver with Robin Williams from Columbia’s 1990 EPK
The screening, co-sponsored by the Oliver Sacks Foundation, will be introduced by Susan R. Barry (aka “Stereo Sue”) and Aniruddh D. Patel, both of whom were great friends of Dr. Sacks.
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA. Thursday, February 16 at 7 pm
Top image: Dr. Oliver Sacks, as played by Jarrett Porter
© Eric Woolsey / Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
